Republicans will try to remove their own candidate from the ballot in a suburban New York congressional race because he wrote an article warning against racial mingling, a party official said Wednesday.

But the plan doesn’t sound very viable:

Colety said the GOP would go to court to get Russell off the ballot.

“We’ll say he doesn’t have core Republican values, that’s what we’ll try, that will be our legal argument,” Colety said. “And if we can’t get his name off, we could probably find another candidate, run him as a write-in.”

The party would then promote the write-in candidate as the “real” Republican candidate, Colety said.

The write-in candidate they can do; the court case is almost certain to fail. This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. In Michigan in 2008, both Kyle Bristow (he of the Solutrean hypothesis) and Randy Gray (an actual KKK member who showed up on the streets of Midland in his robes after Obama was elected) were elected as precinct delegates. And in Florida, the son of racist leader Don Black was elected to a county Republican committee. But those are internal party positions that the party has more control over than someone who legally qualified for a public ballot.